


Science

by Pigeon_theoneandonly



Series: N7 Month Prompt Challenge 2020 [2]
Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Gen, Mass Effect 2, Miranda deserved better, Project Lazarus, content note: child abuse mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:21:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27370372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pigeon_theoneandonly/pseuds/Pigeon_theoneandonly
Summary: In the midst of the Lazarus project, Miranda ponders her complicated history and its relation to her current experiment.
Series: N7 Month Prompt Challenge 2020 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1999261
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	Science

Her father intended her to study law.

Miranda picked up the cup beside her, took a drink, swallowed. Returned to staring into the clean room where the VI robot continued its delicate surgery, installing the implant to repair Shepard’s severed spinal column. All those undergraduate applications. Thousands of words of essays, an impeccable curriculum vitae, test scores, special tutors, the fights and the way her wrist ached for days after her frayed patience failed. She’d made a fist at her side. That was all, that small, singular sign of frustration. He’d grabbed her by the arm and twisted until she begged his forgiveness for this unimaginable transgression, from the floor, where he forced her to her knees.

_Never lose your temper. It’s uncivilized. Nobody listens to an angry woman._

She took another sip. 

Shepard had been an angry woman. And now all that temper lay quiescent, reduced to a comatose lump of barely living meat. _Look where it got her._

_But Shepard… they’ll listen to her_ , she’d said, months ago, to a man who valued her self-control nearly as much as her father, albeit with considerably more respect for Miranda herself.

It took six months to get Oriana settled with her adoptive family. A further nine of Cerberus training, learning their operations protocols, and honing her scattershot martial training into actual fighting discipline. A handful of field ops to test her learning; Miranda had never failed a test in her life. And then a second meeting with the Illusive Man, where he informed her she was going to college.

Miranda snorted to herself. Inelegant; she took a perverse pleasure in it, in moments of solitude. _Anyone can fire a gun,_ he lectured her, displeased by her objections. _You have one of the top minds of your generation. I need you to use it._

Back then, her father still searched for her using all the considerable resources at his disposal. For six years, she became someone else. That woman’s doctorate was collecting dust along with the rest of her belongings in a storage unit aboard Arcturus Station.

She picked biology. Miranda glanced out into the boredom of the laboratory, nothing but the hum of the machines to keep her company. _And look where it got me._

Her father saw scientists the same way he saw accountants, or cooks. Specialized servants. Not decision makers. Not the sort of people who ran things; just ants in the hill that was his business. Like little organic computer programs to be run and terminated according to needs other than their own. Ten years later, Miranda still experienced a frisson of deep and genuine satisfaction picturing the look on his face, if he ever learned his daughter had become one of the help. Maybe that was the entire reason she’d picked it. At the time, it was just one more gate to clear to get to her goal.

Miranda poured another finger of gin into the glass. 

This was irresponsible. Sure, the project had been calm for weeks now; since taking over for Wilson, they’d developed a new plan and kept right on track. The possibility of an emergency arising was near nothing. But Miranda Lawson hadn’t been raised to leave the slightest thing to chance.

She would have been a phenomenal lawyer. The liquid sloshed into miniature waves and crests as she tilted the glass, idly. A phenomenal lawyer not allowed to practice, moved into her father’s company as a vice president the moment she graduated, CEO-in-training and kept neatly under his thumb until the day he died, and bound by his will well into his afterlife.

Had Shepard ever wondered about her afterlife? Impossible that it hadn’t crossed her mind. As an N7 marine, a spectre, a human alive amid the constant strife of the modern age, Shepard lived too closely to death to not have formed some opinion. Doubtful it had included having a cybernetic mess twisted into her spinal cord.

Miranda tipped the gin down her throat. Best not to go down that road. Shepard wasn’t a person right now. She was a subject, the object of a careful series of experiments charting a course to unprecedented scientific achievement and securing a critical asset for Cerberus and all mankind. Their mission outranked her personhood.

That morning, Jacob had asked her, not for the first time, if what they were doing to Shepard was fair. As if creation were ever even slightly concerned with fairness. Nobody asked to be made. Nobody had any control over how they came into being. In some respects, that primal lack of control was the most natural thing in the world.

It didn’t matter if Shepard wanted to be here, any more than it mattered that Miranda didn’t. They both had a job to do. And failure was never an option available to either of them.


End file.
